5 Public Administration and Organization Studies

Abstract

The study of public organizations has withered over time in mainstream organization studies research, as scholars in the field have migrated to business schools. This is so even though government organizations are an important part of the universe of organizations—the largest organizations in the world are agencies of the U.S. government. At the same time, the study of public administration, once in the mainstream of organization studies, has moved into a ghetto, separate and unequal. Centered in business schools, mainstream organization research became isomorphic to its environment—coming to focus on performance issues, which are what firms care about. Since separation, the dominant current in public administration has become isomorphic with its environment. In this case, however, this meant the field moved backward from the central reformist concern of its founders with improving government performance, and developed instead a focus on managing constraints (i.e., avoiding bad things, such as corruption or misuse of power, from occurring) in a public organization environment. Insufficient concern about performance among public administration scholars is particularly unfortunate because over the past 15 years, there has occurred a significant growth of interest among practitioners in improving government performance. The origins and consequences of these developments are discussed, and a research agenda for organization studies research that takes the public sector seriously is proposed.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Bob Behn, Sandy Borins, Hannah Riley Bowles, Trevor Brown, Adam Grant, Rod Kramer, David Lazer, Todd Pitinsky, Matt Potoski, Hal Rainey, and Fred Thompson, as well as the editors, Jim Walsh and Art Brief, for helpful comments on a draft. I would also like to thank Carl Loof for helpful research assistance.

Notes

1. It should be noted that many outside of the field have rightly criticized the casualness about causality in regression-based analysis that marks much of main stream organization research.

2. To be sure, mainstream organization studies have suffered ongoing bouts of anxiety (e.g., Rynes, Bartunek, & Daft, 2001) that its research is insufficiently useful to practitioners. Furthermore, of course, one should not, of course, exaggerate the successes of mainstream research in generating results conclusiveenough to be used for performance improvement, though the nihilist view that we have learned nothing would also be wrong.

3. Wilson (1989) used the word tasks to describe what I call “goals,” and Simons used the phrase “boundary systems” to describe what I call “constraints.”

4. In linear programming or economics, one often speaks of maximizing goals subject to constraints.

5. A helpful way to think about the difference between goals and constraints, although it does not apply perfectly, is in terms of the common distinction in moral philosophy between “negative” and “positive” duties (Russell, 1980; Tooley, 1980). Negative duties are those that require one to refrain from some action (e.g., do not kill), and positive duties are those that require one to undertake some action (e.g., save people who are dying). Constraints can generally be respected if an organization does nothing—if an agency lets no contracts, it will not violate the constraint that contracting officials should not award contracts to relatives; if it has no program to combat terrorism, it will not risk violating the due process rights of terrorist suspects. Meeting goals almost always requires action. Simons (1995) stated, “If I want my employees to be creative and entrepreneurial, am I better off telling them what to do or telling them what not to do? The answer is the latter. Telling people what to do by establishing standard operating procedures and rule books discourages the initiative and creativity unleashed by empowered, entrepreneurial employees. Telling them what not to do allows innovation, but within clearly denned limits… Boundary systems are stated in negative terms or as minimum standards” (p. 84). One should also distinguish between constraints and multiple goals. If the U.S. government seeks good relations with India and Pakistan (where improving relations with one may hurt relations with the other), the State Department faces multiple goals. These are not the same as constraints. Those arguing for a “stakeholder” rather than a “shareholder” view of the firm are typically arguing for the importance of goals other than shareholder wealth maximization, although sometimes they are also arguing that greater attention should be paid to constraints (e.g., accounting ethics). Thus, Freeman and McVen (as cited in Sundaram & Inkpen, 2004) argued, “The stakeholder framework does not rely on a single overriding management objective for all decisions,” and Clarkson (1995, p. 112) argued, “The economic and social purpose of the corporation is to create and distribute wealth and value to all its primary stakeholder groups.” In both cases, the corporation is pursuing goals—creating value that then must be distributed—not merely respecting constraints.

6. More broadly, greater attention is paid in government to mistakes than to achievements. White (1926) observed that public officials perceive that “when ever we make a mistake, some one jumps on us for it, but whenever we do some thing well nobody pays any attention to us. We never get any recognition except when we get ‘bawled out’” (p. 243–244). Half a century later, Derek Rayner, the CEO of Marks and Spencer brought into the British government under Thatcher, noted that, in government, “Failure is always noted and success is forgotten” (Rayner, as cited in Hennessy, 1989, p. 595).

7. These are long-standing facts about government. In an earlier era (and still in many countries, especially in the developing world), constraints were often violated (e.g., by corruption or political favoritism), making respect for constraints a more natural part of the political agenda. White (1926) noted that government needed to apply a standard of consistent treatment of cases in a way unnecessary in business. The long-standing focus on constraints explains the lack of attention, until recent decades, to development of nonfinancial performance measures in government—agencies' most important counterparts to firms' profit measure—including issues of measurement and standardization (a counterpart to GAAP for nonfinancial government performance metrics).

8. The bureaucratic form has become so associated with government that, for example, Wilson's (1989) classic book on government agencies was simply titled Bureaucracy, and political scientists generally refer to government agencies generically by the name “the bureaucracy.”

9. Over the last 30 years, a distinction has developed between those who call the field “public management” and those who continue to use the older phrase “public administration.” The significance of this terminological pluralism will be discussed in a later section.

10. Lewin's (1958) early research about attitude change in groups, while not involving small groups inside government, was about how agencies might persuade people to eat odd cuts of meat during wartime rationing.

11. The second number includes students studying social work, so the real contrast is larger. The number of MBA students has more than doubled since 1980, while the number of MPA/social work students has increased by about half.

12. In 1986 one conservative columnist wrote, “We should be eternally grateful that government is stupid and bungling,” and added, “I want a government that is stupid, lethargic, and low-performing.” Barry Goldwater expressed a similar sentiment in The Conscience of a Conservative (Behn, 2005, pp. 1–2).

13. Although this will not be a major theme in this chapter because it centers on organization studies, parallel to the separation of public administration from organization studies, a separation from political science, the other discipline to which the field was traditionally connected, has also occurred. The reasons were somewhat different. During the 1950s, political science began using more sophisticated, quantitative methods; in the 1980s, the field became interested in formal modeling. This favored research on individual voting behavior or congressional roll call votes over studies of organizations because large sample sizes made them more amenable to quantitative analysis. The new political science also had little sympathy for public administration's practical approach; in their view, “public administration concerns the lower things of government, details for lesser minds”—frequently ridiculed as obsession with “manhole covers” (Waldo, 1990, p. 74; see also Fesler, 1990; Kettl, 2002). Political science, therefore, began, in effect, to shun public administration. By 1962 the American Political Science Association (APSA) report, “Political Science as a Discipline,” mentioned public administration “only in passing,” and the 1983 APSA compendium did not even include it as a subfield (Henry, 1990; Kettl, 2002, p. 84). Currently, most of the meager body of political science research on organizations is written in a principal-agent tradition and discusses relations between legislatures and agencies (for summaries, see Bendor, 1990; Bendor, Glazer, & Hammond, 2001). A small body of work is closer to mainstream organization studies (e.g., Miller, 1992; Hammond, 1993). Carpenter's (2001) work about the efforts of senior public managers a century ago to build operating capacity and political support has an extraordinarily modern ring, although it involved managers working long ago.

14. The Public and Nonprofit division of the Academy of Management had 497 academic members as of 2006.

15. The Handbook of Public Administration (Peters & Pierre, 2003) had a section called “Organization Theory and Public Administration,” although the topics discussed were idiosyncratic enough to suggest lack of broad familiarity with the field.

16. Younger scholars (e.g., Heinrich, 2000; Heinrich & Fournier, 2004; Bertelli, 2006; Hill, 2006) have tried to move the field toward mainstream social science. As this chapter proceeds, the reader may note the dominance of books over articles in citations. This is because the academic culture of emphasizing papers over books—reflecting a methodological shift to bounded empirical work—is just beginning in public management.

17. Mosher (1956) noted that, for this reason, the journal was “not itself an adequate or appropriate outlet for more than a very few research reports” (p. 272).

18. The phrase “generic” is negative, suggesting bland inferiority (e.g., to call wine “generic” is an insult).

19. For research about firms, the danger—and the worry the Walsh et al. paper expresses—is that constraints are underresearched (consider the somewhat orphan status of business ethics research). I will return to this toward the end of this chapter.

20. Some organization theory literature (e.g., Meyer & Gupta, 1994) has sought to problematize the concept of “performance” in organizations.

21. The phrases do not have the same connotation: “Economy and efficiency” suggested strong emphasis on saving money, i.e., treating performance as a constant, while reducing the cost of producing it (e.g., White, 1926; Gulick, 1937), while “performance” suggests emphasis on quality as a variable. However, one early author did argue, “When we say efficiency, we think of homes saved from disease, of boys and girls in school prepared for life, of ships and mines protected against disaster” (as cited in Waldo, 1948, p. 196). Both the words “efficiency” and “performance” are alternatives to emphasis on constraints.

22. Bertelli and Lynn's (2006) work was extremely helpful in preparing this section of the review (chapters 2–3).

23. Simon received the Waldo Award in 1999, a surreal event for many reasons, including their earlier hostility. The public administration section of the APSA actually conducted a formal debate at its 2005 meeting about whether Administrative Behavior or The Administrative State was the most influential public administration book of the previous 50 years (Rosenbloom & McCurdy, 2006b).

24. Bertelli and Lynn (2006, p. 179) noted the closing sentence in Waldo (1952) stating that Simon might become a major figure “if he can resist the temptation to make a career of defense of his first book” (p. 503) and then noting that this “is the fate that awaited Waldo.”

25. Somewhat later, this became a theme in political science as well (e.g., Lowi, 1969; Aberbach, Putnam, & Rockman, 1981; Gruber, 1987).

26. The United States went through a similar effort around the same time with the Reagan-era “Grace Commission,” named after a corporate CEO who headed an effort led by private sector managers to identify wasteful spending produced by poor management.

27. The spread of reform might be analyzed through a neo-institutionalist lens as a fad, but the reinventing government program was launched with nary any foreign influence, and it is hard to imagine that Thatcher received her ideas from New Zealand.

28. By contrast, business managers brought in as volunteers had been responsible for the Reagan-era Grace Commission.

29. A contemporary descendent of this view is the argument for rules/standard operating procedures in terms of their roles in creating organizational capabilities (e.g., Nelson & Winter, 1982, chapter 6; March, Schulz, & Zhou, 2000).

30. The U.K. hostility is noteworthy in that these efforts have gone on long and visibly. The lack of empirical research is particularly unfortunate given the plethora of government-generated data that could be analyzed.

31. The expression recurs endlessly in the chapters in Ferlie, Lynn, and Pollitt (2005). This word occasionally appears in critical management studies theory (e.g., Clegg & Hardy, 1996), generally to mean a mainstream approach centering on managers in organizations rather than on workers or other constituencies.

32. Adding “-ism” to a common word typically warns of something ominous being hinted.

33. Another example is hostility to the idea of “entrepreneurship” among non-elected officials, a topic to which I will return in a slightly different context in the following section.

34. Other critics (e.g., Peters & Wright, 1996), however, expressed the opposite worry, that the distinction between “steering” and “rowing” in Osborne and Gaebler (1992), and hence in new public management, recreates the politics/administration divide, reducing the ability of nonelected officials to participate in policymaking.

35. The previous discussion of the founding decades of academic public administration suggests that, at least for the United States, the reference should be to traditional values in public-sector practice rather than to public administration theory.

36. The mainstream literatures on cognitive biases, groupthink, and escalation of commitment (e.g., Bazerman, 2005; Janis, 1982; Staw, 1981) indeed warns of dangers of premature commitment and inappropriate failure to consider disconfirmatory evidence. One should seek, however, to create ability for managers and organizations to reduce these problems in decision making while still taking advantage of the performance-enhancing impacts of belief in a goal. Minimally, why there should be a division of labor between career officials and politicians whereby the latter specializes in enthusiasm while the former specializes in warding it off is not clear.

37. Perverse consequences of course occur, but the appropriate comparison is not between a perfect change, without such consequences, and an imperfect one where they are found, but between an imperfect change and the status quo.

38. Rainey's master's degree is in psychology and his Ph.D. is from a public administration program housed within a business school.

39. The projects were undertaken in cooperation with Governing and Government Executive magazines respectively, both publications aimed at senior government managers.

40. An academic pecking order phenomenon was also at play here because public policy programs were generally at universities with higher standing than those with public administration programs; faculty at public policy schools occasionally stated with arrogance that public administration graduates would work for their graduates.

41. Looking back to an earlier era, Savoie (1994), a public administration separatist, wrote, “The term administration rather than management best described government operations… The role of administrator involved the applying of formal ized procedures” (p. 172).

42. A new journal, broadly supporting public management reform, was revealingly called the International Public Management Journal; it contained a number of papers defending new public management (e.g., Behn, 1998; Gruening, 2001).

43. They therefore saw a public service culture in the service of performance not as a justification for separatism.

44. RAND also published its own collection High-Performance Government (Klitgaard & Light, 2005), focusing specifically on government.

45. The business literature on stakeholder management and the balanced scorecard (Kaplan & Norton, 1996) also discusses nonfinancial performance issues, but certainly for the latter, and mostly for the former (Walsh, 2005), the nonfinancial performance measures are seen as being at the service of a superordinate goal of financial performance. For public organizations, no such subordination exists; nonfinancial and financial (in a public-sector context, cost control and/or efficiency) performance measures have independent status.

46. Currently a business school academic, Snook was an Army officer and West Point instructor before writing the dissertation forming the basis for the book.

47. Public administration literature is less relevant to questions of stakeholder management and conflict resolution than one might imagine because this literature (e.g., on political management, Moore, 1995; Heymann, 1987; on public deliberation, Reich, 1990) assumes a context of decision making in a democratic political system that does not apply to firms.